All Musicals Are Adaptations

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"So start off on the right foot and select a story that is all prepared for you. The translation of that story to musical form is quite complex enough. Within that frame you will find more than adequate challenge to your originality and enough on which to experiment."

— Alan Jay Lerner, Advice to Young Musical Writers

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Many musicals - one could even argue the majority - are adaptations. There are two major reasons for this tendency:

a) Dramaturgy. Many musicals will have separate artists working on each aspect of the text - book, music and lyrics. Some musicals will have more than one person working on each aspect, and then you have the influence of directors, choreographers and producers. It's hard enough to write a good story as it is, so adapting an existing and proven story provides everybody working on the show with a touchstone.

b) Commerciality. Primarily, musical theatre has always been a commercial medium that tries to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Moreover, as the sheer costs of staging a Broadway or West End musical continue to skyrocket, producers are under increasing pressure to guarantee their shows will be smash hits. Audiences are more likely to come see a musical (or play, or film ...) based on a property with which they are already familiar, so adaptations are a safer bet than original works, though of course they're not sure hits (as proven by the line of unsuccessful musical adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac stretching back to 1899).

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This trope is so common that it is more useful to list exceptions and parodies than straight examples, and it is often said "great musicals are not written, they are re-written". Note, however, that it can be difficult to define what counts as an "adaptation". Whilst many musicals draw their narrative structure directly from the movie, novel, stage play, comic book, short story, ancient Greek myth etc. on which they were based, many other musicals take their inspiration from a variety of unusual sources - a historical figure or event, a painting, a concept - but provide an original narrative. Historically, this is hardly a new phenomenon, as most operas, operettas and ballets are also adaptations. Only here it is not as obvious to lay people thanks to Adaptation Displacement and because many classic operas were adapted from works which were not as well-known in the first place or which have since been entirely forgotten by the general public.

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Incidentally, this is why so many so many musicals are subtitled The Musical!

Some musicals, such as 1776, The Civil War, Floyd Collins, Pacific Overtures,Titanic (which coincidentally was produced the same year as the film of the same name), Elisabeth and Parade are not based on any literary source, per se, but rather on historical event. Though The Civil War does include a few direct quotes from speeches, etc., what these musicals get from history is their plots and many/most of their characters.

The same is somewhat true of Assassins as well, which takes historical figures and events, and mashes them all together into one timeless vacuum... type... thing.

Hamilton falls under a weird middle ground here. While it's inspired by the book Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, in that Lin-Manuel Miranda got the idea for the show while reading it while on vacation, it's as much an biographical adaptation of Hamilton's life as a direct adaptation of Chernow's biography. Furthermore, the show takes many more liberties with Hamilton's life than a straight biography like Chernow's would, and features themes (such as the importance of legacy) that Chernow's book does not.

Come From Away also fits- based on interviews with residents of Gander, Newfoundland, and the people on planes who were diverted there when American airspace was closed after 9/11.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro and Me and Juliet were originals. All other musicals they wrote (including movie and TV musicals) were adaptations.

Zombie Prom is an original musical, which was adapted into a much-abridged film.

Moana was heavily inspired by the myth of Maui, but is not a direct adaptation, making it the first Disney musical to avert the trope. With the possible exception of The Lion King depending on who you ask.

Repo! The Genetic Opera is a borderline example — the writer adapted his own stage play, titled The Necromerchant's Debt into a musical.

Rockford's Rock Opera

Singin' in the Rain, although it was written to utilize a bunch of existing songs the studio already owned, is actually a double aversion: a movie musical that is neither based on an existing story or adapted from a Broadway musical. What's largely forgotten is that this was actually common practice for film musicals of the era, and had been for a good ten years; this is simply the most famous example.

Parodies

The Simpsons has numerous fictional musical adapations which parody the concept by having drawing from bizarre or inappropriate sources:

In "A Streetcar Named Marge", she stars as Blanche in a musical adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (opposite Ned Flanders as Stanley!) whose cheery closing song "You Can Always Depend on the Kindness of Strangers!" managed to completely miss the point of the original line. When Andre Previn made A Streetcar Named Desire into an opera later in The '90s, he explicitly cited the "Simpsons scenario" ("Stella, Stella, can't you hear me yell-a?") as an instance of what he tried to avoid; its libretto simply sets the original text of the play to music.

MAD had "Keep on Trekkin'", a Star Trek musical that addressed the post-cancellation success of TOS in reruns in The '70s. It ends with the cast turning down a network executive's offer of a Revival because they're making so much money already — it was written before the movie franchise was established in 1979.

"Coming Musicals" in MAD #41 suggested that, when Broadway starts running out of likely source material, new musicals could be based on telephone directories, railroad timetables, and cook books, producing song hits like "The Bell-Box Of My Heart" and "Oh, Your Lips Say Central Standard."

Later issues had musical versions of Star Wars ("The Force and I") and The Lord of the Rings ("The Ring and I"). Note that Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities and The Lord of the Rings have since been adapted into serious stage musicals, and Disney's Tarzan received a Screen-to-Stage Adaptation. (Lord of the Rings has also since been... rather less seriously adapted.)

MAD TV did a skit in the late 1990s spoofing how campy the Batman movie franchise had become by having the 5th one done as a Broadway musical. In fact, Warner Bros. actually had Jim Steinman and David Ives working on a Batmanmusical for several years, but it didn't pan out.

Erin Brockovich: "I may dress like a cheap table dancer / but give me a call if you think you've got cancer.."

The only thing preventing a Star Wars musical is George Lucas's dignity (dear God, we're screwed). But it has been adapted into an opera. Fourtimes,infact.

A Tale of Two Cities is also staged as a musical (Two Cities) in the Martin Short comedy A Simple Wish.

In the movie The Tall Guy Jeff Goldblum's character, trying to get into serious drama, finds himself starring in Elephant!, a musical version of The Elephant Man.

On 30 Rock, Jenna has been in musical versions of Con Air and Mystic Pizza.

A cutaway reveals Peter once performed in Red Dawn - The Musical on Family Guy. "I'm a Wolverine/And my hatred keeps me warm..."

Gilligan's Island had the castaways staging a musical of version of Hamlet to try to persuade a producer to return to civilisation and take them with him. He steals their idea, returns to civilisation and leaves them stranded.

An episode of The Critic features Jay and Doris going to Andrew Lloyd Webber's newest musical, Hunch!, an adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The sequence takes swipes at the commercialism ("Brought to you by Toyota: the hatchback fit for a hunchback!") and strange staging common to ALW's musicals. Note that this episode predated the Disney adaptation of Hunchback — which had its own problems trying to make the story a musical that could also move merchandise — by two years, and the more straightforward Notre-Dame de Paris by four.

In Andrew Lippa's version of The Wild Party, the brothers d'Armano write a musical called Good Heavens, based on the Bible.

In one episode of The Venture Bros., Rusty wants to make a musical about his life (a Johnny Quest boy-adventurer sort of childhood with its own cartoon show), though this never gets off the ground. He does get a duet with the in-universe version of Spiderman, the Brown Widow, which might be a parody of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. For a bonus joke, Brown Widow mentions being in The Sound of Music as a kid, the film of which featured Nicholas Hammond, the 1970s TV Spider-Man, as Friedrich Von Trapp.

"Y'know Ferb, one of the best times we ever had was when we built that rollercoaster. We should do it again! This time, as a musical! Whadya say? We'll do all the same things, except we'll break into spontaneous singing and choreography with no discernable music source!"

The movie Hamlet 2 is about a high-school drama teacher and failed actor trying to stage a musical sequel to the play (which is probably most famous for killing off nearly every major character by the end). Naturally, everyone else thinks it's an utterly terrible idea.

An episode of Seinfeld features Scarsdale Surprise, a Tony Award-winning musical based on the highly publicized murder of famous diet book author Dr. Herman Tarnower. It also has a weirdly meta version of this, with another nominee being a musical of the fictitious movieRochelle, Rochelle that the gang watched in a previous episode.

The first episode of season 5 of Jonathan Creek, "The Letters of Septiumus Noone", is set around an operatic adaptation of The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, which Locked Room Mystery fan Jonathan thinks is a travesty.

Jon and Al Kaplan make one-song snippets of fictional musical adaptations of 80s action movies on their Youtube channel.

In the radio comedy What Does the K Stand For?, Stephen's form teacher claims to have been involved in a musical version of Gone with the Wind called Wind! with Lionel Blair as Rhett Butler.

The plot of the Robert Rankin novel Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls is Poole and Omalley creating a musical based on Armageddon: The Musical.

In End Bosss World, Flash Man stars as Neo (and the special effects crew) of The Matrix: The Musical, co-starring Dr Mario as Morpheus.

One episode Pepper Ann begins with the title character finishing a lead role in a musical based on an in-series plush toy. She's complimented for her performance, then discover she was mistaken for an Identical Stranger who starred in a musical called Phantom of the Apes.

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